At the turn of the century, life expectancy for both men and women was roughly the same-45 years for men, one year more for women. By 1930, deaths of women in childbearing had been basically eliminated, but the age gap between women and men at death continued to increase-by 1950 it was five years; now it is eight. If this trend continues, it is estimated that by 2020 there will be a 12-year difference in the life expectancy of women and men. The difference is so striking that one wonders why there hasn’t been a major public outcry as to why men are dying younger than women.
Sex difference were until recently ‘expected and unquestioned in all aspect of life,’ gerontologist Lois Verbrugge has pointed out. Statistics revealed such differences increasing over the century but were taken for granted ‘and not given further scrutiny.’
At first there seemed to be a contradiction in these statistics- men die younger, but women report more illnesses, thus, women appear sicker in the short run, but are less likely to die when ill. Further, women are ‘much more active in personal hygiene or health care.’ The fact that women seemed to get sick more often actually hid a basic and increasing male disadvantage. Examining mortality data from the National Centre for Health Statistics (1958-72), Verbrugge found that all causes of death combined, female rates were only 56 to 64 percent of male rates. Males showed increasingly higher death rates than females for most leading causes of death period 1958-72-heart diseases, cancer, cardiovascular problems, accidents, pneumonia, arterioscleroses, which women once seemed to suffer more frequently, now render a far higher number of men unable to carry on major activities. The difference widens for every successive age group-some 28 percent of all men 65 and over were so disabled that they could not do strenuous work of any kind, compared to only eight percent of women were diagnosed more often for cancer. Evidently women are more likely to report symptoms of cancer and hypertension in time for them to be treated.
Lately, psychologists have been investigating why women seem to report more illnesses and go to doctors. They speculate that women are more sensitive to changed in their own health and body signals, that women may be more willing than men to report illness, that girls are more socialized than boys to take caring measures when ill, and that women have more flexible roles and fewer time constraints than men. Even in conditions where women seem to report more sickness, their strikingly lower mortality rates highlight a worsening situation for men. However, until 1970, women certainly seemed certainly sicker than men. Some of that evident sickness was surely caused by women’s narrow sex role and inequality. In famous essay written in the 1940s, the eminent anthropologist Ruth Benedict blamed women’s greater psychological impairment on the discontinuities of women’s lives. A girl grows up going to school, playing games with boys, competing for good grades. She goes to college, starts a job, and abruptly, in her twenties, has to put ambition aside for the isolation of her own home and her role as wife and mother. And then suddenly, at 45 or 50, her role is finished as she experience menopause and the ‘empty nest.’ It was not really questioned, during those years, why a great preponderance of beds in mental hospitals were filled with women suffering ‘involutional melancholia.’
But the studies done since the 1960s on women aging in America are full of new contradictions, paradoxes-surprises. In the years that women have been breaking through the feminine mystique. They have apparently stopped suffering a lot of those symptoms of impaired mental health and even physical distress that obscured their survivors’ strengths. In fact, the actual experience of women in the last 25 years who continued developing after their childbearing years has defiled the expected traumas of empty nest, menopause, even widowhood.
For example, when researchers went researchers when back 20 years has later to follow up the groundbreaking Midtown Manhattan Longitudinal Study, originally done in 1954, they were surprised to discover that mental health of women had shown increase impairment each decade after 20, and drastic decline after 40, compared to men. In the later years, the percentage of women suffering Impaired mental health after 40 had been cut more than half-from 21 to eight percent-whereas men’s impaired at nine percent.
In the 1980s, Resalind Barnett and Grace Baruch of the Wellesley Centre for research on women compared women aged35 to 55 in all sorts of compared combinations of roles and found, instead of the expected decline of mental health with age, that most great women experienced a sense of resurgence, of revitalization, a new self and sense-worth in midlife that gave them confidence. By the 1980s, what asked about age, these women, at 55, said, ‘well, I’ve lived through all this change and my life is so much better now, so the next change is not a great fear for me. Why should I be afraid of it?’
The entrance of increasing millions-by now a majority-of women into jobs and professions and decision-making roles in society was, of course, the most striking of the last 25 years. But in the national studies, housewives as well as working women experienced the same dramatic improvement in mental health after mid-life. In the Baruch and Barnett study. I was struck by the fact that the sense of self-worth and openness to change was found most strongly not among lifelong professional women with the highest status, but among women who combined marriage, motherhood, and work were in the greatest state of psychological well being. The combination seemed to give them greater control over and more pleasure in their lives, buffering the more burdensome part of either role.
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